She was the only person who really knew me, all of me, and still accepted me as I was. She wasn’t just the first girl I’d fallen in love with. She was also my first and only true best friend other than my brother, and the only person I’d been completely honest with. If I lost her, there wasn’t another person on this planet who would know who I really was.
I couldn’t lose her.
I wouldn’t. If she went, she’d have to take me with her.
I closed my eyes, pressed my lips to the back of her hand, and whispered, “Tell me what I have to do, and I swear I’ll do it. Just please...don’t die.”
“You have to let go of yourself and what you want,” Mike had told me during our one and only tutorial on healing. The useless spellbook said the same thing. “You have to learn how to let go of who you are.”
Just let go, I could hear Tarah whisper to me.
And just like that, it clicked.
It was like falling asleep. Or maybe I really did fall asleep, because it sure seemed like a dream.
I was outside my body, a thin silver thread holding my spirit to my body at my stomach. I saw Tarah’s body just below me, and my spirit growing smaller, floating down, the cord that bound me to my body stretching like infinite elastic as I seemed to sink right through Tarah’s skin, through her tissues and muscles, into her veins that appeared all around me then like a maze of red tunnels. Beyond, I could feel her organs throbbing and pulsing.
Something bumped into me. I turned to look. It was a strangely shapeless black blob. And there, another black orb.
“Tarah, I’m yours,” I whispered, embracing those evil shapes, not willing them to come to me, but simply allowing them to attack me if they wanted to. Because I didn’t care if I got sick now. If that was what it took to save Tarah, if I had to take the virus out of her and into my own body, even if I got sick in the process, even if I died, it would be worth it. Up to now, my life on earth hadn’t really been all that spectacular. But Tarah...she deserved to live. She had a story to tell. Hers. Mine. These people’s. She had to live and tell that story so it wouldn't all be a big pointless waste.
But the black masses raced away.
“No!” I shouted. “No, it’s me you want, not her!”
The virus didn’t listen, and I could see it through the semi transparent walls of her veins, rushing off to attack her heart now, surrounding the desperately beating organ as if it were the last fortress in the virus’s war on humanity and it must be brought down tonight.
And as always, I couldn’t save her. I seemed destined to love her and lose her. I had no sword, no Clann skills, no medicine, no weapon at all to fight the virus with. Nothing. If only the virus would attack the both of us at once, then at least I could die with her and maybe it would be all right. But I could not face being the survivor. I didn’t want to survive Tarah.
“Hayden,” I heard Tarah murmur, her voice all around me at once.
“I’m failing you,” I confessed in a whisper to her.
“No. Don’t you see? This is not some ordinary virus. It thinks and reacts to us,” she whispered back, her voice coaxing me not to give up. To have hope, as she always did, just one more time.
Somehow I found the strength to listen, to think about her words. “Then what is it? How do we beat it?”
“You must find its source.”
Its source? What was she talking about?
As I began to get angry and frustrated, I felt myself slipping away, being pulled backward toward my own body again. And the more I fought it, the more strongly I was pulled away.
Because I was being negative?
I tried a different strategy, giving up resisting the pull. “Okay, Tarah. You win. What is its source?”
“Not what. Who.”
My spirit eased back into my own body again, and I woke up, needing the deep breath of air I took as if I’d just surfaced after being underwater too long.
A dream? Or had I truly connected with Tarah’s unconscious mind?
She was still asleep, her fever as high as before. And her pulse... I felt it beneath my fingertips at her wrist, its every beat more feeble than the last.
As if her heart really was now under attack. Just like in my dream.
She’d said the virus wasn’t normal, that someone was creating it. But who? Who would want to hurt a bunch of outcasts hidden away in the woods?
The government? My dad?
I’d heard of experimental programs in the past where they’d used psychics to help them with government projects. And my father had said the government was working with scientists now, trying to suppress the genes that caused Clann abilities. What if they had changed tactics and were trying to wipe us out completely from a distance now, using Clann abilities to attack us with a fake illness that would cause us to die one by one?
If so, they sure were taking their time about it. Shouldn’t the government have been killing us off much faster, if that was their intention?
What if they didn’t want to kill all of us? What if they still wanted to capture us for some reason? The illness could be sent to try and flush us out of hiding and into nearby hospitals.
“Tarah, I’ll be right back,” I promised, kissing her burning cheek before I stumbled to my feet and out the door on wobbly legs to the infirmary.
“Hey, Tarah’s got an idea,” I said, only partially lying in order to get Mike and one of the healers to listen to me in the master bedroom. Once I had their attention, I told them the possibilities that I’d come up with.
“Tarah said this?” The older dragon lady I’d faced off with at the tiny house stood before me now, hands on her wide hips, her eyes squinting with suspicion.
“Yeah,” I said, figuring Tarah wouldn’t mind the half truth. If I’d really connected with Tarah’s unconscious mind, then it was the truth. And if I hadn’t and it was a lie, well, she’d lied about me being the one to suggest we all go to my grandma’s in South Dakota. So she couldn’t exactly mind my using her own tactics now. “Is it possible? Could someone use a spell to attack us and disguise it as a new strain of flu?”
Mike frowned. “Hey, didn’t you healers say you couldn’t pin the virus down in any of the patients in order to treat it?”
“That is true,” Dragon Lady replied. I really needed to learn more people’s names around here. “But why wouldn’t they kill us off faster?”